The EGI blog - sipos

User Community Support Team 2013 plans

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:39:00 GMT

The 2013 plans of the EGI.eu User Community Support Team recently emerged from our annual appraisals. I would like to share the key elements of this plan with you, so our partners within the NGIs, within projects and communities can see the 2013 focus areas of our Amsterdam-based team of four.

Federated identity management

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:23:00 GMT

During the last decade e-infrastructure communities and their perception of X.509 certificate based access to e-infrastructures has changed significantly. Many of the existing and potential user communities of EGI consider the personal certificate based access as one of the main barriers of uptake. Some of these communities – together with their support teams from the National Grid Infrastructures (NGIs), NRENs and scientific projects – developed various solutions to simplify, sometimes even to completely eliminate, certificate based login mechanism for users. An overview of these solutions is given in a recently published report (Authentication solutions in the European Grid Infrastructure), covering approaches that build on ‘identity federations’. The previous blog post introduced the concept and benefits of identity federations; this post summarises related activities from the EGI community.

Federated Identity Management

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:37:22 GMT

In a distributed environment many information service—such as e-mail, library databases, data repositories, portals, grid/cloud computing applications—require users to authenticate themselves. Within a single institute an institutional identity management system can simplify this authentication for the users. Rather than having separate credentials for each system, a user can employ a single digital identity to access all resources to which he/she is entitled within the organisation. Federated identity management extends this approach beyond the institutional level, creating a trusted authority for digital identities across multiple organizations. This blog post introduces the concept and benefits of identity federations, the next post will describe why and how EGI activities from the domain bring benefits to scientific communities.

Workflows, workflow systems

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:55:00 GMT

Scientific calculations that run on distributed computing infrastructures often require the coordinated execution of computing jobs, transfer of files, registration of meta-data and usage of various types of infrastructure services. These actions can be organised and made repeatable by workflows and workflow systems.

What do you want to know about portals?

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:17:00 GMT

Empowering scientific communities with simple tools that enable them to utilise services of the European Grid Infrastructure is highly important for the successful engagement ofEGIwith with new users. Portals play an important role here. Portals can ...

MapReduce talk by Dr Jimmy Lin

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:03:00 GMT

Dr. Jimmy Lin, associate professor at the University of Maryland gave a lecture in Amsterdam on Friday about Hadoop MapReduce. Dr. Lin was invited to the Science Park by BigGrid – the Dutch NGI – and by the Amsterdam Information Retrieval ...

New gadgets for the EGI Training Marketplace and the Requirement Tracker

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:15:00 GMT

Until recently, the whole thesis of providing and sharing software services within the EGI community has been that these applications must be either accessible through well defined portals operated by EGI members, or must be available as downloadable packages so users can operate their own installations. As I have explained it earlier, there are several problems with this approach and these problems can be solved if our software services were provided through web gadgets. I have good news: there are two new web gadgets available for the EGI community. One gadget to access the Training Marketplace and another gadget to access the EGI Requirement Tracker.

Web widgets for the EGI Community

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:14:49 GMT

The previous three parts of my series of widget posts described the widget concept, provided guidance on how to use EGI widgets if you are a web site/portal provider, and on how to create EGI widgets if you are a software developer. This fourth, last post offers another way in: turn third-party widgets to EGI widgets.

Web widgets for the EGI Community

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:58:17 GMT

The first part of my series of posts on web widgets introduced the widget concept, and its importance for Our community. The second part provided instructions to operators of EGI-related web pages on how to embed EGI widgets into their sites. This, third post shows how software providers from the comunity can participate in EGI widget activities.

Web widgets for the EGI Community

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:14:58 GMT

The previous post described web widgets and why widgets are relevant to the EGI community. Now it’s time to see how can You, a member of this community adjust to this new situation. First, let's look at how your services are currently accessed and ...